Operations
Dec 23 2025
Quotas and headcount planning sit at the core of any well-oiled go-to-market (GTM) machine. When they are done well, the sales organization starts the year with clarity and confidence. When they are not, sales strategy teams spend months iterating on “the plan,” often landing it late in Q1, while the field stalls, waiting for direction.
I’ve run this process for many years from a RevOps perspective, across organizations including Google, MongoDB, Segment, and Intapp. Below is a practical, experience-driven view of how to approach quota and headcount planning in a way that holds up in the real world.
This is written for business analysts, RevOps, and sales strategy leaders who know the mechanics and want a proven, field-tested approach.
1. Partner Deeply With FP&A on Top-Down Planning
Top-down planning typically starts with FP&A. They look at historical performance, growth trends, macro assumptions, and investor expectations to set an overall revenue target for the sales organization.
FP&A is excellent at reading the numbers. What they often lack is firsthand exposure to what actually happened in the field.
Not all trends are created equal. Some are structural shifts. Some are one-offs driven by temporary factors like pricing changes, comp plan quirks, territory imbalances, or a short-lived product spike. Others are early signals that have not yet shown up clearly in the historical data.
This is where RevOps adds disproportionate value. Sitting side-by-side with FP&A and pressure-testing assumptions with “from-the-trenches” context is critical. A good RevOps leader does not fight the model. They improve it by grounding it in reality.
2. Establish the Current Production Capacity of the GTM Team
Before you talk about growth, you need to understand what your GTM organization can realistically produce today.
That means:
The business will almost always expect productivity to increase year over year. That is reasonable, but those increases need to be backed by explicit assumptions.
Ask yourself:
One more reality check is attrition. In many SaaS organizations, annual rep attrition can reach 25% to 30%. Those heads do not just disappear. They need to be replaced before you even start growing. Ignoring attrition is one of the fastest ways to break a plan.
3. Model New Headcount Realistically (Growth Plus Attrition)
Once you project next year’s productivity, you will almost certainly find it is not enough to hit the top-down target. That gap is where new headcount comes in.
At this stage, precision matters.
Ramp time is usually underestimated. Many companies default to rules of thumb like:
In my experience, those assumptions are often optimistic. When you dig into actual performance data, true ramp to full productivity can be significantly longer, sometimes close to double.
Ramp also depends on context:
Hiring velocity matters too. You cannot hire everyone on Day 1. Work closely with recruiting and use historical hiring data to model:
Headcount planning that ignores hiring constraints is mathematically correct and operationally useless.
4. Translate Required Production Into Quotas (and Add a Sensible Buffer)
At this point, you have tied together the top-down revenue targets, expected productivity, required headcount, hiring timelines, and ramp curves.
The implied required production per rep IS the quota (in theory). But reality is messier than any model.
Things will go wrong:
That is why most companies apply a buffer, typically 10% to 20%.
My recommendation is to keep it as low as possible and avoid going above roughly 15%. Above that, you are no longer managing risk. You are making quota harder to hit in a way that tends to reduce attainment, increase rep frustration, accelerate attrition, and break the very model you were trying to protect.
Quota also needs to pass the fairness test:
If you cannot sell the quota internally, it does not matter how good the spreadsheet looks.
5. Data Is the Real Bottleneck
All of this hinges on having clean, accessible historical data:
This data is surprisingly hard to reconstruct, especially in organizations where reps are constantly joining, leaving, or changing roles.
That is exactly where EasyComp helps. Our data model preserves historical context over time, so when planning season arrives, you are not reverse-engineering the past. You are building forward with confidence.
Quota and headcount planning is not easy, but it is critical. It becomes dramatically more manageable when your assumptions are explicit, your constraints are real, and your data is trustworthy.
If you want to talk more, or explore how EasyComp can support your planning process, feel free to reach out.
By Jose Fernandez
About the Author
Jose Fernandez is part of the team behind EasyComp.ai, building infrastructure that helps companies run sales compensation without spreadsheets, confusion, or delays. He believes incentive systems should be easy to operate—and crystal clear to the people who earn them.
Gabe Salzer
Revenue Operations
Strategy - HIGHTOUCH
EasyComp is so intuitive that our sales team needed almost no training to get started. Now, our account executives have real-time payout visibility, with clear explanations that eliminate back-and-forth with operations, allowing them to stay focused on closing deals.
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